Saturday, January 1, 2011

HNY

2011 invites a new decade-like time-span into history. It will be called the “twenty-teens” even though it will not really be "teens" for another two years. Because history requires punctuation as much as English composition there will be an apparent pause in events as 2011 begins.

Some historians will refer to the proper decade as the “twenty-tens”. They will do this because of a misguided desire to cover all of the 21st century in similar-sounding precisely-defined increments of time. They will do this because they are insufferable dweebs.

By calling the time-span from 2011-2019 the twenty-teens one gleans the delicate fruit of psychological allusion.

“The twenty-teens behaved like its eponymous ill-mannered child”. “The twenty-teen neo-cons became the teen-mom to the teabagger love-child that someone else would have to raise”. “The developed world’s twenty-teenage experimentation with geo-engineering became an addiction whose grip proved almost impossible to break”.

Much will appear to happen in the next nine years simply because it will be cool to blame it on the twenty-teenage years.

That is, of course, if we make it to the actual twenty teens. I allude to the “End of the World” which is supposed to take place on December 21st 2012. I love it when the world ends; I got way too much enjoyment out of Y2K. I have a special project I am working on to mark the last days. It will involve my penchant for snide historical commentary, and I will reveal what it is just before December 21st of this year.

This past year I was wildly successful with all of my characteristically feeble New-Years-Resolutions. I planned on posting at least once-a-month to this blog, and instead I posted over a hundred times. I resolved to write a poem and read it to an audience of strangers, and I wrote several and read four. It is true that my audience consisted of only three people so my hand-waving beat-poet-at-the-lectern image of myself dissolved in a puff of disillusionment, but the audience made up for their small numbers in their crowded strangerness.

For this next year I’ve decided to bring in more readers to this blog. I've become part of "The Atheist Blogroll" and "Planet Atheism". You can see both the Atheist Blogroll and Planet Atheism badges in my sidebar. The Atheist Blogroll is like any other topical blogroll; basically a list of topically-related blogs. Planet Atheist is a aggregator blog which publishes topically-related feeds from a number of blogs; this makes it a convenient place to read a bunch of atheist blogs at once.

The Atheist blogroll is a community building service provided free of charge to Atheist bloggers from around the world. If you would like to join, visit Mojoey at Deep Thoughts for more information.

If you would like to join Planet Atheism you can find more information on how to do that by clicking on the Planet Atheism badge in the sidebar.

The blog has been very successful in bringing in readers this past year. Thousands of people have read this blog, not counting some who get it on direct feed. They have clicked in from every continent, and every state of the union (except Iowa).

Readership stokes more than just my ego. When people click on the automatically-generated advertisements on the side panel I make money. This year I made more than a dollar and seventy-five cents. I am going to blow the entire wad of cash as a partial sponsor of a racer in the 2011 Los Angeles marathon. I should be able to buy him at least two gels with the money (to be consumed at mile 7 and 14). If I can find a sharpie on March 20th he will be sporting “Adult Onset Atheist (adultonsetatheist.blogspot.com)” somewhere on his running outfit.

Ego-stroking was accomplished in spades by another project which I will cryptically call “PTIP”. A collateral yield of PTIP was the contacting of a couple dozen folks I had not seen in decades. I was reminded again and again how very awesome people can be. Sometimes it is easy to get a distorted picture of the Human species when looking at it as an amalgam. Time had worn down some of the people to shiny stubs which sparkled in amazing intensity when they even mentioned the people they loved. Some had diffused into the very structure of their surroundings; when they smiled everything around them smiled just as brightly. Some had risen through adversities so sublime they empathized with unique authority. With some I discovered strange new friendships and converse with them regularly about profound interests. Only one retreated into a passive aggressive cave with a sign reading “I did not even return his last e-mails” nailed above its gaping mouth. Most filtered through our brief time together, and left an amazingly optimistic sweetness in their wake.

I feel like the year called twenty-ten left an optimistic sweetness in its wake. I can’t add up some score value, and say it was a positive year on average. I can’t look at an emotional tide-chart, and say it has ended on a high note. I can say that I cared about some people in 2010, and it feels very likely that I will do so even more in the future. I can say that I loved some people in 2010, and it feels more than likely that I will do so even more in the twenty-teens.

Followers

About Me

I am an adult onset atheist. I cannot blame parents, society, or an unhappy childhood on my decision to abandon all things theist. I clung for a while to a deist god, but it too was eventually thrown onto the trash-heap. Why insist that I am believing in a “god” when “gravity” or “electromagnetic radiation” are better names? I finally found that I was clinging to the weakest shadow of a deist god because I connected the belief in this imaginary entity with so many good things in the world. One day I realized that those good things would be better without the residue of a belief in god contaminating them.